Eliminating Inefficiencies at Seattle Children’s Hospital
Seattle Children’s Hospital was the seventh highest ranked children’s hospital in 2011, according to U.S. News & World Report. For any organization that is committed to saving lives, it becomes very important to identify and remove the inefficiencies from systems and processes so that more resources become available to cater to patient care. At Seattle Children’s, management is continuously looking for new ways to improve the quality, safety, and processes from the time a patient is admitted until discharge. To this end, a lot of time is spent in analyzing the data associated with the patient visits.
To quickly turn patient and hospital data into insights, Seattle Children’s implemented Tableau Software’s business intelligence application. It provides a browser based on easy-to-use analytics to the stakeholders, making it intuitive for individuals to create visualizations and to understand what the data has to offer. Data analysts, business managers, and financial analysts, as well as clinicians, doctors, and researchers, are all using descriptive analytics to solve different problems in a much faster way. They are developing visual systems on their own, resulting in dashboards and scorecards that help in defining standards and the current performance achieved, measured against the current standards. Through the use of monthly and daily dashboards, the day-to-day decision making at Seattle Children’s has improved significantly.
Seattle Children’s measures patient waiting times and analyzes the data with the help of visualizations to discover the root causes for patient waiting. They found that early delays cascaded to the rest of the day. They focused on on-time appointments of patient services as one of the solutions to improve the patient overall waiting time and increase the availability of beds. Seattle Children’s saved about $3 million out of the supply chain, and with the help of tools like Tableau, they are finding new ways to increase savings while treating as many children as possible.
1. Who are the users of the tool?
2. What is a dashboard?
3. How does visualization help in decision making?
4. What are the significant results achieved by the use of Tableau?
What We Can Learn from This Application Case
This case shows that reporting analytics, involving visualizations such as dashboards, can offer major insights into existing data and illustrate how a variety of users in different domains and departments can contribute toward process and quality improvements in an organization. Furthermore, exploring the data visually can help in identifying the root cause of the problems and provide a basis for working toward possible solutions.